Anthropologists Writing About Copts In Postrevolutionary Egypt

“Twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, Pope Shenouda comes out on state television and assures everybody that Christians and Muslims are all one cloth,” a Coptic student wrote in an essay in my social theory class at the American University in Cairo more than a decade ago.

The essay was on the concepts of latent and manifest in social theory. The notion that we are all one, all Egyptian, and that the only difference is one of faith, was the “manifest transcript,” the narrative that was allowed to be said in the public sphere. But there are hidden transcripts that can be said only within families or small circles of friends: “Yes, our Muslim neighbors are good people. But when it comes right down to it, you can’t completely trust them.” Across the street, Muslim parents are telling their children the same thing.

With the revolution, many of these traditions about what can and cannot be said are changing. Simultaneously, the differences between Copts and Muslims, and the place of Copts as minorities in the new Egypt, are matters of serious and significant debate.

So it is interesting to read what anthropologists have been writing about Egyptian Christianity over the past year. Here is a brief survey of eight recently published works on Coptic Christians in Egypt.

An article entitled “Coptic Christian practices: formations of sameness and difference” by Lisa Paulsen Galal of Roskilde University in Denmark that appeared in the journal Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations seems to hit many of the same points my student did, although she ends hopefully. Here’s the abstract:

The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular-liberal democracies, one that guarantees the peaceful coexistence of religiously diverse populations. Enshrined in national constitutions and international laws and treaties, the right to religious liberty promises to ensure two stable goods: (1) the ability to choose one’s religion freely without coercion by the state, church, or other institutions; and (2) the creation of a polity in which one’s economic, civil, legal, or political status is unaffected by one’s religious beliefs. While all members of a polity are supposed to be protected by this right, modern wisdom has it that religious minorities are its greatest beneficiaries and their ability to practice their traditions without fear of discrimination is a critical marker of a tolerant and civilized polity. The right to religious freedom marks an important distinction between liberal secularism and the kind practiced in authoritarian states (such as China, Syria, or the former Soviet Union): while the latter abide by the separation of religion and state (a central principle of political secularism), they also regularly abrogate religious freedoms of their minority and majority populations. Despite claims to religious neutrality, liberal secular states frequently regulate religious affairs but they do so in accord with a strong concern for protecting the individual’s right to practice his or her religion freely, without coercion or state intervention.

In the dark midnight hours of 11 December 2009, the Virgin Mary (al-‘adhra) burst into visibility against the skyline of al-Warraq, a working-class district on the neglected peripheries of Giza, Egypt. Hovering within a glowing triad of crosses, the apparition attracted spectators to the Church of the Virgin and the Archangel Michael along the main thoroughfare, Nile Street, even in the inconvenient hours between dusk and dawn. Within days, the Virgin was being discussed far and wide by Christians and Muslims, Egyptians and foreigners, skeptics and believers. Reactions were diverse: A journalist announced to his friends, “Even if the Virgin appeared before my very eyes, I would deny her.” A cab driver explained, “It is a trick, a big laser show in the sky.” A young mother urged, “Why [forbid oneself] the joy that the Virgin brings?”

The chapter that precedes Keriakos’s is on moulids, and offers a pretty pessimistic description of the way things are going.  In the chapter, entitled “What Do Egypt’s Copts and Muslims Share? The Issue of Shrines” author Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen begins:

Egypt is now one of the Middle Eastern countries where the interconfessional situation is most tense, and where the discourse of the other (Muslim or Christian) is most aggressive.

She writes of a past of shared saints and holy men, and common participation in the peculiarly Egyptian religious ceremonies around shrines known as moulids. But today, she writes: “The days when half the crowds that flocked to Coptic moulids were Muslim are long gone. Neither Copts nor Muslims want to mix. (p. 169). Islamist leaders come in for much criticism for their efforts to suppress interfaith practices and “purify” Islam, but the fault is not entirely that of the Muslims. Mayeur-Jaouen writes:

The reform of the Coptic moulids also represents, finally, an attempt on the part of the Copts to be more reformist than the Muslims. Shenouda’s version of the Coptic revival is just as fundamentalist as the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood (p. 168)

The current story of the Copts in post-revolutionary Egypt has also been marked by the death of Pope Shenouda–a man mourned for the deep and abiding love of his people but also criticized for his many compromises with the regime–and the rise of new organizations of Copts asserting political identity and agency as citizens outside the hierarchy of the Church. It is a time of extraordinary flux and associated risk and much more is yet to be written by these and other scholars.

[I am indebted to my colleague here at Miami James Bielo and his blog tracking recent publications in the anthropology of Christianity (co-authored with UCSD anthropologist Jon Bialecki) anthrocybib for allowing me to track down all these publications]